A top government scientist with several PhDs in climate science, environmental studies, and climacteric syndrome ( recurring symptoms experienced by some women during menopause-hot flashes and chills) who wishes to remain anonymous, has informed me that many former and present members of the Congressional Climate Summit, have expressed serious concerns that the hot air emanating from the media and Congress and the methane Pelosium gas which is the prime constituent of swamp grass are contributing to Global Warming and causing irreversible harm to our Planet. rsk
While a coalition of leftists, globalists, and rent-seekers rage about President Trump’s awesome decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate hoax, a key aspect of the president’s announcement is being overlooked — his offer to renegotiate.
In his Rose Garden speech, Trump stated:
So we are getting out. But we will start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.
As a leader in the climate skeptic movement, I was at first disappointed to hear about the possibility of renegotiation. But upon further reflection, I considered that Trump had simply included it as one might use “sure, I’ll call you” following a bad date.
Yet now, I’ve concluded that his renegotiation offer may actually be brilliant, and could possibly be utilized to help American businesses, to solve real environmental problems, and even to assuage climate alarmists.
Thanks to fracking, America has a surfeit of natural oil and gas. So much so that our glut has depressed global oil prices.
Although Obama’s war on coal was wrong, it was made possible by the gas glut. There would have been no way for utilities to switch from coal to gas without the surfeit provided by fracking. But as a result, America’s carbon dioxide emissions are back down to 1990s levels. So fracking is a tried-and-true way to reduce emissions while keeping electricity prices low.
Our problem, though, is that the gas glut is not only hurting the coal industry, but it’s also hurting the oil and gas industry by keeping prices so low. If prices are too low, incentives for greater production are limited. Prices are hurting ExxonMobil so much, for example, the oil giant actually supports a carbon tax as a means of raising prices.
That’s bad business, bad policy, and bad politics.
A much better policy: Look to Europe and China, two large economies that have major problems which American natural gas can solve.
Europe is dependent on Russia for a large part of its gas supply, and is therefore vulnerable to the whims of Vladimir Putin on energy — and just about everything else. In China, the dirty way it burns coal for residential heating and cooking befouls its air, especially during the winter, to the point where deadly accidents occur because of visibility problems.
President Trump should sit down with the Europeans and the Chinese and offer them America’s natural gas.
Natural gas would wean Europe off of Russia. CONTINUE AT SITE
The next time President Donald J. Trump thinks about national-security leakers, he should shout this four-letter word:
“Jail!”
Washington has become riddled with leaks. They far exceed gossip whispered to journalists to hamper political rivals. Breaking news that Steve Bannon oversalts his eggs or Reince Priebus blasts his speaker phone would be distracting and foster strife, not harmony. Such infantilism merits discipline or, ultimately, dismissal.
Relentless leaks of state secrets are something completely different.
When reports of President Trump’s combative discussion with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull emerged in February, they reflected poorly on Trump. This may have been what senior officials intended when they peddled these secrets. These leakers also sent world leaders a simple message: Whatever you tell Trump may be in the papers within hours. So, watch your words. Or avoid his calls.
This obstructs U.S. diplomacy.
Likewise, one or more leakers gave the Washington Post secrets about Trump’s discussions with Russian diplomats about ISIS’s plans to bomb jets with weaponized laptops. Reports that Israel uncovered this plot seemed designed to portray Trump as reckless with foreign intelligence. But the leakers, not Trump, blasted the Israeli angle worldwide.
Notorious leaks about ISIS’s deadly attack on Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England, appeared crafted to humiliate him during his European tour. This leak earned a public rebuke by British prime minister Theresa May and a high-profile, albeit temporary, suspension in Anglo-American intelligence sharing.
Not good.
Washington’s blabocracy pre-dates Trump. Soon after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, word spilled on how America tapped Dr. Shakil Afridi to pay a house call on a Pakistani residence and confirm that it was bin Laden’s home. Perhaps some Obamite wanted the world to know how clever the previous administration was. Alas, this leak outed Dr. Afridi. He now is serving a 33-year prison sentence for cooperating with Washington. The enemy now knows this technique. Pro-U.S. physicians who might want to help America fight radical Islamic terrorism now will think thrice before doing so.
Under G. W. Bush, some idiot revealed that America had intercepted bin Laden’s satellite phone in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s line soon went dead.
Not helpful.
A former Green Beret, Lt. Colonel Michael G. Waltz, explained on Tuesday’s Fox & Friends: “ISIS, al-Qaeda, and these other groups have English-speaking cells that scour American newspapers and look for leaks, so that they can react and change their tactics.”
President Trump must lead the charge against these scoundrels.
“I believe when you leak the kind of information that seems to be routinely leaked, at a high, high level of classification,” homeland-security secretary John Kelly told NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think it’s darn close to treason.”
“The main felony that can (and should) be charged in this situation is the Espionage Act (18 USC 793),” former U.S. attorney and counter-terrorism specialist Andrew McCarthy told me. “Subsections (d) and (f) call for a penalty of up to ten years in prison. It is really essential to prosecute some people, to stop these leaks.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/448246/print
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is reprinted with permission from Acculturated.https://acculturated.com/how-college-summer-reading-programs-are-failing-our-students-and-our-culture/
Many colleges have a “common-reading program” that assigns incoming students a book to read over the summer before starting school in the fall. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has just released its annual study of these programs, and the findings, while not unexpected, are a disheartening indication of how higher education is shortchanging our youth — and our culture.
The Beach Books Report (BBR) is an examination of the common-reading programs of 348 colleges and universities in nearly every state in the country — 58 of them identified by U.S. News & World Report as among the top 100 universities in America, and 25 among the top 100 liberal-arts colleges. Thus, you might expect from them reasonably challenging reading assignments that reflect the highest quality education — but you would be wrong. If you assumed that the recommended books include such classics as, say, St. Augustine’s Confessions or even Ralph Ellison’s more modern Invisible Man, then you are blissfully ignorant of the intellectually shallow state of our purported institutions of higher learning.
The NAS study revealed that colleges rarely assign classic works anymore; in fact, all the books in the common-reading programs for the academic year 2016-2017 were published during the students’ lifetime — 75 percent of them since 2010. Moreover, a significant number of the readings demonstrates the degree to which “high culture” has capitulated to pop culture: many are graphic novels, young adult novels, books based on popular films and TV shows, and books associated with the left-leaning National Public Radio (NPR).
The NPR factor comes into play because the books’ themes are increasingly politicized and heavily weighted toward social-justice activism. Indeed, as FrontPage Magazine’s Jack Kerwick notes in his article about the BBR, the reading programs’ mission statements emphasize “non-academic goals” such as “building community or inclusivity.”
The BBR’s authors note that the themes strongly reflect “the common reading genre’s continuing obsession with race . . . and its progressive politics.” The “most popular subject categories this year were Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery (74 readings), Crime and Punishment (67 readings), Media/Silence/Technology (34 readings), Immigration (32 readings), and Family Dysfunction/Separation (31 readings).” The most routinely assigned text is Bryan Stevenson’s nonfiction work Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Its theme is “African-American” and its subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.” In fact, those two were the most popular subject categories for the last three years in a row.
The report laments that the “ideologically-constrained” reading selections have become “homogenous” and “predictable,” and that the programs promote progressive dogma and activism rather than encourage “the virtues of the disengaged life of the mind.” The BBR’s damning conclusion is that this politicization makes “the common reading genre parochial, contemporary, juvenile, and progressive.”
By contrast, the National Association of Scholars appends its own list of 80 recommended books appropriate for college common-reading programs. It includes such classics as the aforementioned Confessions and Invisible Man, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (once the most widely-read work in English besides the Bible), as well as the usual — or perhaps not so usual anymore — suspects such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Orwell.
Steering our youth toward ideological activism is not education — it is indoctrination.
Disturbingly, however, students for decades now have been too often brainwashed into shunning the wisdom of Dead White Males, disconnecting themselves from our common culture, and instead, embracing a historical narrative of oppression and victimhood that molds a false identity for them based on tribal classifications of skin color, class, and gender. That way lies the death of the individual, of culture, and of civilization itself.
When did the definition of “leadership” in America become “the courage and foresight to ignore the United States Constitution”?
The fact that the sun rose again this morning was less predictable than the media-Democrat hysteria over President Trump’s entirely reasonable decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Convention on climate change. The decision was clearly right on the merits: The pact, which would do nothing meaningful to address global temperatures, is an exercise in progressive preening, touted by hypocrites who zip to and from climate confabs in their private jets — the kind of “Do as I say, not as I do” lovers of humanity (but loathers of people) who never take one plane when two are available.
To anyone but a zealot in the Church of Climate, it is obvious that carbon emissions are best reduced not by central planning but by a private sector free to innovate and respond to the market demand for environmentally responsible products and practices. That is how the United States leads, how it is already driving down emissions, and how it can promote the generation of wealth and know-how that — far better than dubious statistical models and rose-tinted crystal balls — would enable 22nd-century Americans to address their environmental challenges.
All that aside, however, President Trump’s decision should have been obvious and indisputable, not momentous. That it was not is a measure of detachment from our constitutional moorings.
The Paris Convention is a treaty. Under the Constitution, a treaty does not become law binding on the United States unless the president submits it to the Senate, obtains two-thirds approval there, and then ratifies the treaty. (Contrary to popular belief, the Senate does not ratify treaties; the president does the ratifying, but only if the Senate has consented.) That never happened to the climate agreement. It never had a chance of happening.
In this instance, as in others, President Obama conspired with his fellow transnational progressives to defeat the Constitution he had sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. He waited until late 2016, the eleventh hour of his presidency, to sign the agreement. As with the Iran deal, he had no intention of submitting it to the Senate, because there was no way it would be approved there. Because the pact would have punished American companies and workers, Obama knew that pushing Democratic senators into a vote, and boxing Hillary Clinton into a high-profile campaign debate, would have been a body blow to his party’s hopes of retaking the Senate and winning the White House.
The Left’s objective was to impose the Paris agreement without making Democratic office-seekers accountable for it. That is exactly what the Constitution is designed to prevent.
Here is the basic problem for transnational progressives: If the U.S. Constitution remains vital, their ultimate goal of global governance is unattainable.
Their premise is that the Westphalian model, a world ordered by nation-states pursuing their interests, is passé. History, they tell us, has refined us into a single world community, united by common values — eerily like sharia-supremacists’ claim that the ummah is a single world community of Muslims, united by Allah’s law.
By contrast, the Constitution is designed to enable the United States to secure its prosperity, interests, and security in a world where we hope for the best but prepare for the worst — hostile countries and other alien threats. The goal of the Constitution is to protect our nation against the globe’s many troublemakers, not to tame our nation in the name of global stability.
The perfect exemplar of the Constitution’s approach is the treaty clause (art. II, sec. 2, cl. 2). Its requirement of supermajority Senate consent is a presumption against international agreements.
The perfect exemplar of the Constitution’s approach is the treaty clause. Its requirement of supermajority Senate consent is a presumption against international agreements.
This week, I was contacted by a young woman conducting background research for an Israeli documentary on the socio-political fabric of the country.
“We are seeking average Israelis of all stripes and sectors for the program,” she said, asking me if it is true, as she had been told by the person who gave her my phone number, that I am a right-winger. The delicate way in which she broached the subject — as though careful not to cause offense — made me giggle.
“Yes,” I answered, stifling a full-blown laugh. After all, she was merely performing a task she had been assigned.
“I mean, like, really? You’re actually on the Right? I just have to know, so I can chat with you to find out whether you’re appropriate for the program,” she said, revealing she had never heard of me and had not thought to do a Google search before calling.
I replied again in the affirmative, adding that I am secular rather than religious.
“Even better for our purposes,” she said, noting my supposedly sui generis status with satisfaction.
This is not the first time that I have been approached by media outlets to fill the “conservative woman” slot. Nor is it unusual for millennials in journalism to ask me to explain who I am and what I think, rather than doing a bit of investigating on their own.
This particular “interview,” however, was noteworthy, because it gave me an additional glimpse into the secluded intellectual and cultural castle that many Israelis inhabit without even realizing it, let alone venturing beyond its carefully constructed moat. The woman with whom I spoke — let’s call her Maya — is such a person. Like an anthropologist studying a primitive tribe member considered dangerous by the rest of the civilized world, she advanced with caution.
“How do Israelis view right-wingers?” Maya began, apparently unaware that a majority of the country keeps electing what the Left refers to as a “far-right” government. “How are you different from left-wingers?”
She continued: “Is there any left-wing position that you would be willing to consider as valid? Have you ever attempted to look at the world through left-wing eyes?”
I could hear Maya jotting down fragments of my replies, mostly without rebutting them. After about 15 minutes, however, she was unable to refrain from protesting the positions she had requested I articulate. Key among these were my assertion that political conservatives tend to oppose big government, high taxes and the notion that the West is responsible for Islamist terrorism, while championing individual liberty and a free-market economy.
Maya was stunned. It clearly had not occurred to her that she was in favor of interference from the government, particularly not one headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor would she ever have said she was happy to take home only half of every shekel she earns to fund such a government’s activities and priorities. Above all, she was certain that only the Left cared about individual liberty, which is why she practically gasped when I referred her to the gay caucus of Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Just look at the sentiments expressed by the organisation’s CEO’s Facebook friend and drivel merchant “Harriet,” who runs a scurrilous website called Harriet’s Place:
FROM A SCURRILOUS BRITISH BLOG https://hurryupharriet.wordpress.com/
On June 8, British voters will head to the polls, three years early. When Prime Minister Theresa May called last month for a snap election, the assumption was that she would win easily and increase her parliamentary majority. Recent numbers, however, show the gap closing between May and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn – who was given 200:1 odds of when he ran for the party leadership in 2015 – is doing surprisingly well again. This is despite the fact that Labour has been under fire for anti-Semitism in its ranks, and Corbyn himself has been accused of anti-Jewish bigotry. Corbyn denies having a problem with Jews, claiming that he is merely anti-Israel. Even if it were possible to hate Israel without being anti-Semitic – and I am not sure that it is – Corbyn’s words and deeds demonstrate that he often uses virulent anti-Zionism as a cover for his soft anti-Semitism.
For example, in a speech last year, he said that Jews are “no more responsible” for the actions of Israel than Muslims are for those of ISIS. In 2009, he announced: “It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well.”
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. When British voters go to the polls on June 8, will they opt to keep Prime Minister Theresa May in power, or reject rationality in favor of intolerance? (Image source: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The company that Corbyn keeps, too, suggests that at best he gives a free pass to bigotry, racism and anti-Semitism within the ranks of his own party, and at worst, he espouses them. He has shared speaking platforms and led rallies with some of the most infamous Jew-haters. He has attended meetings hosted by 9/11 conspiracy theorist Paul Eisen, author of a blog titled: “My Life as a Holocaust Denier.” He has been associated with Sheikh Raed Salah – leader of the outlawed northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, a blood libel perpetuator convicted for incitement to violence and racism – whom he referred to as a “very honoured citizen” whose “voice must be heard.” Corbyn was also a paid contributor for Press TV, Iran’s tightly controlled media apparatus, whose production is directly overseen by anti-Semitic Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
One of the biggest criticisms of the “Corbynization” of British politics has been the mainstreaming of traditional anti-Semitism. The country’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has called the problem within the Labour party “severe.”
Consider the late Gerald Kaufman, a Labour veteran and close political associate of Corbyn’s who touted conspiracy theories about Jews throughout his political career. When speaking at a pro-Palestinian event, Kaufman said: “Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative Party – as in the general election in May – support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things, bias the Conservatives.” While Corbyn condemned this remark, he refused to yield to widespread demands for disciplinary action against Kaufman. This is in keeping with what a key former adviser to Corbyn, Harry Fletcher, wrote: “I’d suggest to him [Jeremy] about how he might build bridges with the Jewish community and none of it ever happened.”
The Dutch have officially been enjoying the feast of Pentecost since 1815, but the church wants it replaced by an official holiday on Eid-al-Fitr, the day marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
We are too tolerant to intolerance. We think that by allowing freedom to the enemies of freedom we prove to the world that we stand for freedom. But in reality, by refusing to draw boundaries to our tolerance, we are handing away our freedom.
If we want to remain the free and tolerant society which we used to be, we must realize that the West has a concrete identity. Our identity is not Islamic, but based on Judaism, Christianity and humanism. Our freedoms result from this identity.
Next Sunday, Christians are celebrating the feast of Pentecost. A Protestant church in the Netherlands is using the occasion to propose the abolishment of the public holiday for the second day of Pentecost. The Dutch have officially been enjoying this holiday since 1815, but the church wants it replaced by an official holiday on Eid-al-Fitr, the day marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
With its proposal, the Christian group says, it wants “to do justice to diversity in religion.” That is politically-correct claptrap. Browsing through today’s papers, I can, however, understand why many Dutch are in a festive mood once Ramadan is over! These days, the headlines are full of incidents, which De Telegraaf, the leading newspaper in the Netherlands, describes as Ramadan rellen (Ramadan riots).
Suppose Christians would, on an annual basis, start to riot after leaving church on Pentecost and demolish property, arson cars, attack police, throw stones through the neighbor’s windows. Suppose the police would feel obliged to mark the Christian Lent in the calendar as days of heightened tensions. Would we not begin to wonder whether there was something wrong with Christianity?
Or suppose Jewish gangs would terrorize entire town districts on Yom Kippur day. Would we not beginning to wonder what they were being taught in their synagogues? Or would we just accept it, celebrate it even, as indications of the cultural “diversity” of our society?
I am writing these lines in my office in the Dutch Parliament in The Hague, barely a few minutes away from the house where the great 17th century Dutch and Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza lived and died. Spinoza gave the world a philosophy of tolerance and freedom.
However, what we must never do is be tolerant to intolerance. Because if tolerance becomes a snake devouring its own tail, soon there will be no freedom left and the intolerant will rule the world. Indeed, we are almost there. Three and a half centuries after Spinoza, in the city where he lived, I am writing these lines in a heavily protected sector of the parliament building. The windows are blinded, the doors are armored, and police officers are standing watch outside. They are there to protect me against the intolerance which has in recent decades entered our country – an intolerance that is neither Christian nor Jewish or secular, but Islamic. I am not an extremist if I say that. I am telling the truth. And that is my duty.
For here is the crux of the matter: If we want to remain the free and tolerant society which we used to be, we must realize that the West has a concrete identity. Our identity is not Islamic, but based on Judaism, Christianity and humanism. Our freedoms result from this identity. By depriving Islam of the means to destroy our identity, we are not violating freedom; we are preserving our identity and guaranteeing freedom.
Our country has become a Banana Republic. Anything minor Trump does is leaked (a crime), taken out of context, hyped through the roof, and then turned into hysterical headlines by the media.https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/wayne-allyn-root/commentary-conspiracy-theories-and-the-death-of-a-democratic-national-committee-staffer/
But if Democrats conspire to fix an election and a Democratic National Committee staffer winds up killed, you hear nothing about it in the mainstream media. We’re not talking about a conversation here. We’re talking about a real-life murder.
It may be an ordinary street murder by thugs, but just the idea that it could be attached in any way to the DNC makes it off limits to discuss. It’s verboten. We see a total mainstream media blackout. But let’s put the shoe on the other foot and see what the media would say.
What if a Republican National Committee staffer was murdered in the streets of Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016?
What if WikiLeaks publicly stated that this RNC staffer leaked the 44,000 emails that showed Donald Trump and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus conspired to fix the GOP presidential primary and cheated Jeb Bush out of victory?
What if those emails proved a former RNC chairman now working for CNN cheated and gave debate questions in advance to Donald Trump, so he would always have the perfect answer?
What if Trump and the RNC chairman were badly embarrassed by this leak of sensitive, private documents … and Trump’s chances of being elected president were damaged … and the RNC chairman wound up fired because of this leak?
What if the cold-blooded killing of this RNC staffer looked more like an assassination — with the killers never even attempting to grab his wallet, cash, watch or jewelry?
What if WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information on the murder of this staffer, yet no reward was ever put up by the Trump campaign or the RNC?
